Humidity + Heat = Disaster!

We had a very humid and rainy Saturday and I must say, these two combined spell disaster when it comes to rolled fondant covered cakes, at least in my kitchen. While I normally tend to avoid putting such cakes in the fridge by using fillings which don’t require any refrigeration, sometimes they just need to be. This Dumbo and Winnie cake was a chocolate devil’s food with an almond French buttercream and roasted almonds. Understandably, since the French buttercream is perishable, it needed refrigeration and what that meant in this case was a very sweaty cake! (It was crumb coated in American buttercream). On occasion when I do refrigerate the fondant covered cakes they don’t sweat nearly as much as they did this weekend, and at this point I’m convinced the weather was to blame!

Here’s another cake I made along with the previous one. Smurfette and her mushroom house. This was an almond cake with a whipped ganache filling. It didn’t need refrigeration but guess what! It started sweating right before my eyes as I was covering it! Damn weather! While the ganache should have normally thickened, it was actually softening over time resulting in layers slowly squashing the filling outwards. A disaster I tell you! The design I was asked to make was somewhat different from the end result. There were various smurf heads sticking out of the windows which was adorable, but considering I didn’t find the cake too stable I wisely chose not to put them there. It was also a little higher and the mushroom head wider but for the same reasons, I had to stick to something more straight and minimal. And, since the ganache was going soft, for precaution, I had to use the fridge.

I also made a third cake which was a cute truck. This was the ultimate disaster in which it collapsed and fell apart. It was returned, I managed to fix it the best I could. No picture.. I’ll let your imagination run for that one! This one actually collapsed because I chose the filling badly. It was a white chocolate whipped ganache with strawberry. It was slippery, unstable and of course.. the weather surely made everything worse for me!

And finally, I made 250 of these cute chewy almond air balloon cookies, filled with white chocolate almond ganache for a baptism.

Hi! I’m glad you like it! The shape is basically 2 round cakes for the body, a bigger one on the bottom and a smaller one on top in the center and I carved the edges all around at a 45 degree angle. Then I put a rectangle for the head, on top of the bottom cake and in front of the little top one, that I also rounded off and just filled in all the gaps and rounded off the body with the buttercream. The feet were 4 small squares. All pieces were split in two and filled and the rest was basically rounded off and filled with the buttercream. The trunk and mouth is all fondant that I shaped and attached to the head. I hope that was helpful.